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Posted:
18 February 2003
  IEEE Members Receive Top Engineering Honors
Life Fellow and 1978 IEEE President Ivan A. Getting and
IEEE Senior Member Bradford W. Parkinson will share the distinguished
Charles Stark Draper Prize — a $500,000 annual award that honors
engineers whose accomplishments have significantly impacted society — for their
individual efforts toward the development of the global
positioning system (GPS). Each year, the National Academy of
Engineering (NAE) honors those who have contributed to the advancement
of engineering and improved public understanding of engineering and
technology, particularly their contributions to the welfare and
freedom of humanity. The Draper Prize is considered by many to be the
"Nobel Prize" of engineering. Since NAE first began
administering the Draper Prize in 1989, 11
of 18 recipients have been IEEE members.
Getting,
who earned his B.S. in Physics from MIT in 1933 and a D.Phil. in
Astrophysics from Oxford University in 1934, is president emeritus of
The Aerospace Corporation. In the 1950s, he envisioned a system that
would use satellite transmitters to pinpoint with extreme accuracy
locations anywhere on Earth. After it was shown that GPS could work,
Getting became a tireless advocate for making sure the complex system
was actually built.
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Bradford
Parkinson
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Parkinson,
the 2002 IEEE Simon Ramo Medal recipient for his work on GPS, was
Department of Defense program director for the original definition of
the GPS system architecture, as well as for its engineering,
development, demonstration, and implementation. He continues to work
on GPS at Stanford University, further honing its accuracy and using
it to control such things as helicopters, farm tractors, and
spacecraft.
The
Draper Prize and the prestigious Russ Prize will be presented at a
dinner in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, 18 February.
Past Recipients the Draper Prize (IEEE
members highlighted in blue)
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2001:
Vinton G. Cerf, Robert E.
Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, and Lawrence G. Roberts for the development of the Internet.
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1993: John Backus for his development of FORTRAN, the first widely used, general purpose, high-level computer language.
Visit
www.nae.edu
for more information.
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